Mindfulness Meditation Therapy

Drug abuse and addiction are complex disorders that affect millions of people. Those who want to recover need all-inclusive treatment programs that use various types of therapy. This includes therapies that complement traditional methods, such as mindfulness meditation therapy. Learn more about this type of treatment to see if it could benefit your addiction treatment.

What Is Mindfulness?

The term “mindfulness” refers to the awareness of experiences, feelings, and thoughts as they occur. It also means accepting those aspects without judgment. Rather than automatically reacting, mindfulness helps you to accept, be compassionate and nonjudgmental of your thoughts and feelings. It’s often a challenge to learn, but it helps keep you calm so that you can deal with distress in a healthy way.

Therapies and treatments based on mindfulness are becoming more popular in substance abuse and addiction programs. Most of them integrate elements of regular therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy.

What Is Meditation?

For thousands of years, people have used the practice of meditation to achieve enlightenment. It mostly involves calming the mind to concentrate on a certain idea or thought. To practice meditation properly, you need a quiet place. However, you can do it either alone or with others.

You don’t have to set a time or amount of time for meditation therapy. You can do it at any point in the day and for just a few minutes or hours at a time. However, most people who meditate try to do it at the same time every day. This makes it easy for people in recovery to practice even after they complete an addiction program.

The best part, though, is that you don’t have to be religious to meditate. The practice is a great way to balance your mind and body as well as relieve stress. It improves the spiritual connection that you have within yourself and with your surroundings. It also helps you clear your mind.

Combining Mindfulness and Meditation Therapy

At Crestview Recovery, we combine mindfulness and meditation to teach control over thoughts. This helps those in treatment learn how to keep their thoughts from controlling them. Mindfulness meditation teaches them how to live in the moment rather than in the past or future. It also teaches how to avoid harmful patterns of thought.

Problems that Mindfulness Meditation Therapy Can Address

Mindfulness meditation is beneficial for people who have one or more mental health issues to address. It can improve problems such as:

Anxiety

Depression

Insomnia

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Mindfulness meditation does this by improving focus, repairing relationships and increasing satisfaction with life. It can also improve memory, digestion and the immune system. Some other benefits include:

Better sleep

Higher level of self-awareness

Increased creativity

Lower blood pressure

How Effective Is Mindfulness Meditation?

More and more research supports mindfulness meditation as an effective technique for addiction recovery. Studies show that many people consider meditation therapy to be one of the best methods to beat addiction. Combining it with mindfulness only increases its benefits and the potential to help people achieve recovery.

Mindfulness Meditation at Crestview Recovery

If you think that mindfulness meditation therapy could work for you, talk to the expert therapists at Crestview Recovery. We use both moving and seated meditation practices. With our guidance, you can learn how to respond rather than react to distressing situations. Our therapy methods can also help you: